12 Helpful Leadership Development Tools
Imagine a scenario where a team is working on a high-pressure project. The team is struggling to meet expectations and starts feeling overwhelmed. The team leader, Amelia, notices that her team is tired and overwhelmed. As the deadline approaches, the pressure on Amelia and her team increases, and Amelia starts micromanaging tasks, demanding immediate updates, and criticizing her team’s efforts.
As a result, the team’s morale declines; they begin feeling demotivated and stressed. Ultimately, the project's progress slows down significantly because the team is afraid of Amelia’s criticism and the fear of failure.
In the above scenario, the leader could not communicate effectively with her team and the management, emphasizing the dire need for leadership skills. Instead of empowering her team members, she demotivated and stressed them further.
A famous author, James C. Humes, once said, “The art of communication is the language of leadership.” Sometimes, being a leader is not enough; true leaders constantly work on themselves and develop leadership skills to guide their teams effectively!
This blog will explore how leaders can utilize various tools to develop leadership skills. Let us begin by understanding what skills a leader must possess and what leadership development tools are.
What Skills Must a Leader Possess?
Before we begin to explore various leadership development tools, let us start by understanding what are some skills a leader must possess:
Communication
Delegation
Critical Thinking
Decision-Making
Creativity
Relationship - Building
Empathy
Employee Motivation
Conflict Management and Resolution
An easy way to develop leadership skills is to use leadership assessment tools to identify areas of excellence and areas that may require improvement. Let us begin by understanding what a leadership development tool is.
What is a Leadership Development Tool?
A leadership development tool enables leaders to reflect on their leadership styles and improve leadership skills by adopting proven practices, models, or techniques. The best leadership development tools help leaders develop effective leadership skills while encouraging their team members and stakeholders to achieve organizational goals. Let us explore some of the best leadership development tools you can utilize.
12 Best Leadership Development Tools
Here are some of the best tools for leadership development that you can use to improve leadership skills:
Leadership Style Assessment Tools
Every leader has an individual style and specific perceptions of their organizational performance. Most are also usually aware of leadership styles or models they want to adopt. You can use a leadership style assessment tool to understand your leadership style. The eleven common leadership styles are democratic, autocratic, transformational, transactional, strategic, coaching, bureaucratic, visionary, situational, pacesetting, and laissez-faire.
Understanding the leadership style will help you assess how your team members and stakeholders view your leadership within the organization. If your leadership style aligns with how you perceive yourself as a leader, you are more likely to motivate and empower your team while initiating positive changes within the management. Moreover, you can also learn what leadership styles can hinder your team’s performance and avoid replicating those styles.
Clifton Strengths Assessment
The Clifton Strengths assessment helps leaders and managers identify their strengths and how to develop effective leadership skills. There are three steps to this assessment –
Take the Test: It begins with a test that comprises 177 questions that take about an hour to complete. These questions help assess how you would react, think, and behave in various professional scenarios.
Analyze the Result: Once you have completed the test, a customized report will be generated based on your responses. At this stage, you will be able to gauge your inherent strengths.
Use Your Strengths: By knowing your strengths, you can utilize them further to curate an effective leadership development plan for yourself.
While this assessment is readily available online, it costs you between $24.99 and $59.99, depending on how detailed you want your customized reports to be.
Leadership Blind Spot Assessment
A psychological definition of blind spots refers to the lack of awareness of one’s own behavioral traits or skills. Every individual is bound to have blind spots. However, as a leader, you must identify your existing blind spots and work on them to avoid any professional oversight. Leadership Blind Spot assessments help you identify blindspots about yourself, your team, and your organization. You can develop good leadership skills and encourage your team to follow suit by eliminating your blindspots.
Harvard’s Implicit Association Test
The 2019 State of Inclusion survey reveals that about 83% of respondents claimed they have faced subtle, indirect biases and microaggressions in the workplace. These microaggressions are often a result of unconscious bias. The Harvard Implicit Association Test is a leadership development toolkit that helps leaders uncover their unconscious and implicit biases. The test is designed to address biases toward ethnic and religious minorities, the differently abled, the LGBTQAI+ community, and different body types. Overcoming your implicit biases as a leader can enable you to cultivate an inclusive and diverse work culture.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a popular leadership training tool based on famous psychologist Carl Jung’s archetypes. The assessment helps leaders understand their unique traits, characteristics, and behaviors by deciphering their personality type. The test results are categorized into sixteen different personality types – Nurturer, Composer, Performer, Craftsman, Giver, Doer, Counselor, Provider, Supervisor, Visionary, Champion, Thinker, Inspector, Commander, Mastermind, and Idealist. A leader who is aware of their personality type will be able to understand where their natural strengths lie and what areas they must work on to become an empowered leader. Since the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment is very popular, you must ensure you opt for the assessment from a reputable source.
The Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Assessment
A recent survey reported that 52% of organizations claim to offer senior management roles to those with high emotional intelligence. But what does emotional intelligence refer to? It is the ability to manage one's own emotions and the capability to understand the feelings of others.
The Emotional Intelligence assessment created by the Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) helps leaders gauge their emotional capabilities, especially in high-pressure situations. With this free test, leaders can grasp the concept of emotional intelligence, enabling them to navigate high-pressure, emotionally challenging, complex situations and diffuse conflicts within their organization.
The Kolbe A Index
The Kolbe A Index is a unique leadership training tool that helps leaders understand their instinctive responses within specific scenarios. This tool does not measure your capabilities, leadership style, or Intelligence and Emotional Quotient ( IQ and EQ). It is the only assessment tool for leadership development that measures your conative strengths. Leaders can use the Kolbe A Index to help them trust their own instincts when making complex and critical decisions. It will help them reflect on how they operate as leaders and discover areas of improvement. The Kolbe A Index test costs about $55 and is easily accessible online.
IHHP's Performing Under Pressure Assessment
The Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) offers another leadership training tool that helps leaders assess their performance under pressure. The Performing Under Pressure assessment curates a personalized report outlining the measures to improve your performance and response under high-pressure situations. Moreover, it helps you navigate pressure seamlessly without letting it affect your personal life. The test is free of cost and is available online.
Optimal Thinking's Leadership Assessment
The Optimal Thinking Leadership Assessment is specially curated for leaders and working professionals keen on developing effective leadership skills. It is an online assessment tool for leadership development that helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a leader through a set of 25 questions. Once you have completed the test, it will provide detailed and personalized recommendations on honing your leadership qualities and skills. This leadership assessment tool is known for its credibility, as over 4,90,000 leaders, including politicians, military leaders, and Fortune 500 executives, have taken it.
Hogan Assessments
The Hogan Assessment is designed for organizations looking to strengthen their leadership development, hiring processes, and employee retention. It is a personality assessment that helps you understand an individual’s performance within professional settings. The test enables organizations to evaluate how leaders or individuals analyze their cognitive behaviors and how they perceive their identity and reputation in the workplace.
Moreover, the assessment also reveals a leader’s bright side, how they relate to others when they are in their best mood, the dark side, how they relate to others through uncertainty or complex situations, and their inside, which is their individual goals and values. These assessments help leaders develop and fine-tune leadership skills based on their performance.
DISC Assessments
The DISC assessment is one of the most popular leadership development training tools. It evaluates four crucial leadership traits – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientious. These traits help you analyze whether you are a task-oriented or people-oriented leader. The categories of dominance and conscientiousness measure how you handle your team’s tasks and how much attention you pay to ensure the quality of the result. The other categories of influence and steadiness depict how approachable and dependable you are while you guide and supervise your team members. While free DISC assessments are available online, they may be expensive if you consider taking an advanced one.
Energy Leadership Index
Leadership development training tools such as DISC and Myers Briggs help evaluate a leader’s strengths and weaknesses. The Energy Leadership Index, on the other hand, is a leadership training tool for understanding one’s attitude and approach to work and life. The assessment measures your attitude based on seven different energy levels:
Lack of choice. Victim energy. I can’t. I have to. Fearful.
Anger. Combativeness. Resisting or fighting energy.
Rationalizing. Fine.
Care. Compassion. Service to others.
Reconciliation. Win-win. There’s no good or bad or right or wrong.
Intuition. Creative genius. The space of brilliant visionaries.
Complete passion for all aspects of life. Oneness.
As a leader, the Energy Leadership Index assessment will help you redefine and reshape your attitude toward work, enabling you to become a better and more intuitive leader.
How to Choose the Right Leadership Program?
A common dilemma most leaders face is choosing the right leadership assessment tool or program. Choosing the right leadership program or assessment tool doesn’t have to be difficult. You can begin by asking yourself two critical questions:
What are you trying to achieve or assess?
How do you plan on using the data you derive from these tools?
These questions will help you begin your search for the most appropriate leadership assessment tool. Apart from this, you can also consider relevant factors, such as cost, validity, user experience, and practicality. A few questions you can ask yourself when choosing the right tool are:
How reliable or accurate is this tool?
How much does this tool cost?
Does the tool consider different factors such as race, class, ethnicity, etc?
How long is the assessment, and how long does it take to generate results?
Are these assessment tools benchmarked?
Is the assessment tool easy to use?
If you end up choosing the wrong leadership assessment tool or program, it may generate inaccurate results or dismiss crucial aspects of the leadership development process. Hence, choosing the most suitable assessment tool for your organization becomes essential.
We have listed the best leadership development tools to enhance your leadership skills further. However, these tools are limited in their scope, and if you are looking for holistic leadership development, you must combine them with a comprehensive leadership development program.
Suppose you are looking for a systemic approach toward leadership within your organization. In that case, you can create a leadership development system that helps employees develop leadership skills and stakeholders strengthen their leadership skills. So, get started today and redefine your leadership development journey!
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We believe in equal and fair opportunity, so we offer leadership training opportunities to early and mid-level professionals from various backgrounds and ethnicities. We aim to help your organization recognize, reskill, and retain talent by enhancing their portfolios.
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FAQs
What is a leadership assessment tool?
A leadership assessment tool determines and evaluates whether one possesses leadership skills based on various leadership styles and types. These leadership tools and models help leaders identify their strengths and weaknesses, encourage employees to develop leadership skills and help organizations filter potential leaders from a large crowd of employees.
What are the 5 phases of leadership development?
The five phases of leadership development are leading, supervising, managing, empowering, and influencing. These phases outline the different responsibilities of a leader. A leader not only leads but also delegates tasks, supervises or overlooks their team members' work, manages their team and its workload, empowers and motivates each of their employees, and influences their team and other employees to follow the path they have set for themselves.
What are the 4 E's of leadership development?
The 4 E’s of leadership development were a framework proposed by Jack Welch, one of the most prominent global leaders. Forbes magazine honored him to be the “CEO of CEOs.” According to Jack Welch, the 4 E’s and P of leadership development are Energy, Energize, Edge, Execution, and Passion. Simply put, a leader must have sufficient energy to energize their team members, an edge or knack to deal with organizational challenges and execute effective strategies to aid growth and success with a deep passion and commitment.
What is a leadership development program?
A leadership development program is a systematic program offered by most organizations to encourage potential team members to develop effective leadership skills to occupy senior leadership positions within the organization. While most organizations develop their own leadership development training programs, the crux remains to educate and train employees to develop leadership skills.
